Articles
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Eliminating Data Races in Firefox – A Technical Report
We successfully deployed ThreadSanitizer in the Firefox project to eliminate data races in our remaining C/C++ components. In the process, we found several impactful bugs and can safely say that data races are often underestimated in terms of their impact on program correctness. We recommend that all multithreaded C/C++ projects adopt the ThreadSanitizer tool to enhance code quality.
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A web testing deep dive: The MDN web testing report
For the last couple of years, we've run the MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment (DNA) Report, which aims to highlight the key issues faced by developers building web sites and applications. This has proved to be an invaluable source of data for browser vendors and other organizations to prioritize improvements to the web platform. This year we did a deep dive into web testing, and we are delighted to be able to announce the publication of this follow-on work, available at our insights.developer.mozilla.org site along with our other Web DNA publications.
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MDN localization in March — Tier 1 locales unfrozen, and future plans
Since we last talked about MDN localization, a lot of progress has been made. In this post we'll talk you through the unfreezing of Tier 1 locales, and the next steps in our plans to stop displaying non-active and unmaintained locales.
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In March, we see Firefox 87
Nearing the end of March now, and we have a new version of Firefox ready to deliver some interesting new features to your door. This month, we've got some rather nice DevTools additions in the form of prefers-color-scheme media query emulation and toggling :target pseudo-classes, some very useful additions to editable DOM elements: the beforeinput event and getTargetRanges() method, and some nice security, privacy, and macOS screenreader support updates.
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How MDN’s site-search works
Periodically, the whole of MDN is built, by our Node code , in a GitHub Action. A Python script bulk-publishes this to Elasticsearch. Our Django server queries the same Elasticsearch via /api/v1/search. The site-search page is a static single-page app that sends XHR requests to the /api/v1/search endpoint. Search results' sort-order is determined by match and "popularity".
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Here’s what’s happening with the Firefox Nightly logo
The internet was set on fire (pun intended) this week, by what I'm calling 'fox gate', and chances are you might have seen a meme or two about the Firefox logo. Many people were pulling up for a battle royale because they thought we had scrubbed fox imagery from our browser. We can confirm, that this is definitely not happening.
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A Fabulous February Firefox — 86!
Looking into the near distance, we can see the end of February loitering on the horizon, threatening to give way to March at any moment. To keep you engaged until then, we’d like to introduce you to Firefox 86.
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Introducing State Partitioning
State Partitioning is the technical term for a new privacy feature in Firefox called Total Cookie Protection, which will be available in ETP Strict Mode in Firefox 86. This article shows how State Partitioning works inside of Firefox and explains what developers of third-party integrations can do to stay compatible with the latest changes.
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MDN localization update, February 2021
In our previous post, An update on MDN Web Docs’ localization strategy, we explained our broad strategy for moving forward with allowing translation edits on MDN again. The MDN localization communities are waiting for news of our progress on unfreezing the top-tier locales, and here we are. In this post we’ll look at where we’ve got to so far in 2021, and what you can expect moving forward.
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Browser fuzzing at Mozilla
Mozilla has been fuzzing Firefox and its underlying components for a while. It has proven itself to be one of the most efficient ways to identify quality and security issues. In general, we apply fuzzing on different levels: there is fuzzing the browser as a whole but a significant amount of time is also spent on fuzzing isolated code (e.g. with libFuzzer) or even whole components such as the JS engine using separate shells with various fuzzers. For the purpose of this blog post, we will talk specifically about browser fuzzing only, and go into detail on the pipeline we’ve developed.
